In systems such vehicle to vehicle (V2V) or vehicle to everything (V2X), vehicles may be equipped with antennas and transceiver units for communicating with other vehicles or entities such as road side entities. Because of the shape of a vehicle and various mounting restrictions, it may be difficult to mount an antenna on the vehicle such that it has an omnidirectional coverage of the area surrounding the vehicle. For example, one potential mounting position for an antenna on the vehicle is a side mirror. While this may satisfy certain mounting criteria, the vehicle body may block the coverage area of the antenna with the vehicle body acting as a reflector. In this case, the antenna only covers an area adjacent to the side of the vehicle on which the antenna is mounted.
The coverage area may be increased by providing a second, remote antenna. When a single antenna is used, the transceiver and antenna may be co-located, however with a remote antenna, at least some cable must be introduced to connect the remote antenna to the transceiver. Ideally, the connection or cable length between the remote antenna and the transceiver would be minimised but there is a trade-off between cable length and a position of the remote antenna providing broader coverage for the system. Following from the above example, the antenna and transceiver may be mounted on a first side mirror of the vehicle with a remote antenna mounted on the other side mirror of the vehicle. This may provide the system with antenna coverage on both sides of the vehicle, however a cable coupling the remote antenna to the transceiver would have to be at least the width of the vehicle.
The cable may cause a loss of signal power between the transceiver and remote antenna, for example as large as 10 dB. This may greatly reduce the range of the remote antenna. The transceiver itself may not have the amplifying capabilities to amplify a signal on the cable to compensate for this cable loss. This may be addressed by introducing circuitry at the remote antenna to provide amplification to attempt to compensate for the cable loss. However even the addition of such amplification at the remote antenna is not ideal. The present application aims to at least partially address and compensate for cable loss.